Longish post! Executive summary: Empathy is an essential interpersonal
communication skill. More importantly, if you use it, you'll be able
to anticipate speedbumps on the road to the singularity and steer
around them. Impatience with other people's current and historical
suffering is actually going to cost extropians, in the long term.
On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 09:38:11AM +1000, Russell Blackford wrote:
>
> What worries me, however, is that I've seen on this list an extraordinarily
> high level of impatience with, and lack of imaginative identification with,
> other people's current and historical sufferings. It's higher than I've
> encountered in any other forum.
Bingo.
(I'm specifically thinking of Mike Lorrey's take on the Jamaican IMF
loan business -- "well, it's just the market sending them a price signal,
Wake Up!", without considering the little problem that developing out of
a banana economy takes a generation and he's talking about the misery, or
happiness, of several million people. It's just one example, and I don't
mean to single Mike out, but it exemplifies the impatience you mention.)
I think to some extent it's inseparable from extropianism. The low-level
logic of it is that if you want rapid, exponentiating progress, worrying
about historical sufferings seems pointless and people flailing around
in third-world muck seems like an annoying distraction.
On the other hand, I think to some extent it's self-reinforcing
group-think, and group-think that can be broken, at that. All it takes
is for people to step back, once in a while, and question the social
implications of what they're discussing. Just to maintain awareness.
In case you -- whoever you are, reading this -- are getting impatient
with me for suggesting this wishy-washy touchy-feely policy, let
me give a hypothetical example: take technologies of intelligence
amplification. We've already got these, to some extent, as Vernor
Vinge pointed out in his singularity paper: a postgrad student with a
workstation and a network connection can be far more productive than
their peer of fifty years ago.
Let us consider the possibility that intellectual prostheses -- variety
unspecified, but presumably implants of some kind -- become available some
time in the next couple of decades. Everyone who can afford one benefits,
from street-sweeper to uber-genius. Isn't this an unmitigated good?
Well, only if certain conditions are met. The street sweeper will
probably still be as far behind the uber-genius as they were before
the brain implants became available. Absent second-order effects (like:
people who can think better invent street-sweeping robots) he's still
a street-sweeper -- only this time, smarter. This isn't necessarily
a blessing, unless we can find some intellectual equivalent of street
sweeping to occupy his attention. And this is the good scenario --
universal access to intelligence amplification.
If access isn't universal -- they're too expensive for the poor, for
example -- then we get increased stratification of society. And we
have a situation where an uber-genius born into a street sweeper's
family isn't going to get an implant for a very long time; the barrier
to social and career mobility has been raised, not lowered. This
goes for entire societies, so that poor countries begin to fall
behind en masse, because they can't afford the key technology
necessary for wealth creation.
And so on.
The moral of this little story is that gosh-wow technological innovations
that appear, in and of themselves, to be beneficial, can have unforseen
negative consequences. These consequences can be exacerbated by ignoring
the broad social side-effects of deploying new technologies. (Look at
the general anti-science backlash catalysed by Monsanto's clumsy attempts
to deploy roundup-resistant crops and terminator crops, for example.)
-- Charlie
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